The Leaving Cert results came out this week. I have a good few mates who were waiting on them and I was pretty eager to find out how they all did although it has taken me a few days to find out in most cases since I had other experiments to attend to. The whole thing has brought back to me how I felt when I was getting mine; how relieved I was to finally have it all over and done with, not the results themselves, but the entire school experience. You see, the years I spent in that school were some of the worst ones I’ve had and I was more than glad to give it all the Royal FU and get on with life.

I managed to get through all the work alright, I got fairly high grades with putting in much (or any) work so the academic part of it didn’t cause me much bother but I didn’t really fit together with most of my peers, I found them fairly boring and they no doubt found me quite the oddball even voting me ‘Most Likely To Go Insane And Kill Everyone’ in the final year. The class year was filled mainly with really thick redneck culchies who tolerated nothing outside of the norm, everything had to be buzzcut culchie hair,dance music and so on otherwise you were made an outcast. I know this sounds like the usual clicky stuff that happens everywhere, and up until a certain stage I just accepted it as that. Anyway, being an outcast from the masses I hung about with the rest of the outcasts more out of shared interests than innermost friendship, I did consider them as friends, but not on the same vein as people I knew from outside the school, for example I never hung out with them outside of school hours and now I’ve pretty much cut off contact with them. For the first few years I never really hated anyone, sure I didn’t get on well with the cluchies,but I never hated them. But after the Junior Cert was over I felt my dislike of them begin, this was more due to events outside the school than them being ugly to me,but that’s another post for another day.

This trend of accepting all the shit things my classmates did as just being the norm for teenagers continued up until 5th Year (That’s the year of the Leaving Cert, jsut so we’re all clear). This year brought me to the darkest point in my life due to events outside of school. I got into really dark moods and my contempt for my peers reached breaking point, half the time I just wished they would grow up and realise that they were making life hell for some people, they never did, they still haven’t. The other half of the time I would speak nonchalantly of how I would violently murder them, they accepted this as a running joke and I don’t think they ever really sensed my annoyance with them. The teachers were another matter, I got on with them fairly well throughout the course of my education by being vaguely interested in most of the stuff they covered and I reckon they could sense my general contempt for my classmates. At this point even my group of outcasts was beginning to tire me since all they ever did was talk about each other behind each others back, why they couldn’t just accept their friends for who they were disturbed me greatly (once again this is due to events that had happened outside the school over the course of my life). So basically there was nothing positive for me in the school, I hated everyone outside of our group, no one in the group was particularly close to me and the teachers attitude to the approaching exams was grinding on me…Then, about a month before the exams everything went to hell, not just me, everything!

One of the best loved teachers in the school died, this meant everyone was grieving and the bitching got to an all time high, fights broke out and chaos was come again. Despite efforts on part of the staff to mend the rifts nothing really went together. Then one week before the exams one of the students in our year died. This brought everyone back together in sadness and the bitching stopped for long enough to let everyone mend their friendships, but for me it hit deeper, the lad that died had been known to everyone else in our year for the 5 years of secondary school but he had been in the same class as me ever since I started school way back in the day, we’d never really been close, but something about that fact just set me off. I was no stranger to death since I’d lost many of my friends outside the school to suicide so I don’t know why the death of two people I wasn’t too close to affected me so much, I still don’t, it may have just been the culmination of the two deaths plus everything going on out of school.

All through this I’d never really shown that it was affecting me, but some of my closest friends knew that not all was well so they decided to have our annual camping trip a bit earlier than usual and had it the weekend before the exams began to see if it would help lighten my mood a bit. It didn’t.

All this just served to drive home the fact that I needed to get away from my town as soon as possible and so I just got on with the exams and made sure to do enough to secure me enough points to get into college but in the middle of the exams the pent up stress decided to show itself during Irish Paper 2 for which I just walked into the exam hall, got my paper and then proceeded to write ‘I Hate This Shit’ once per line the whole way through the first half of the answer book before handing it in again without having answered a single actual question.

After the exams ended I just went on with life as usual and waited for the results. I knew I’d done well enough to get where I wanted so I wasn’t worried about them, I just wanted to collect them and get gone as soon as I could without too much talking or reminiscing. My Irish teacher (Who was the most epic teacher in the history of teachers in my opinion) kept saying how worried she was about my Irish result since I left so early on the day but she was pretty pleased with the result considering I spent so little time on Paper 2, if only she knew what was actually on the pages after that short time. After I got my results I just thanked a few of the teachers who were particularly good and then left, I didn’t bother going to the after party that night, I jsut called up a few mates to see how they did,then we had our own party on the beach.